Archive for October 2012

By Brad Farrant, University of Western Australia, Fiona Armstrong, Climate and Health Alliance, and Glenn Albrecht, Murdoch University

Climate change has been widely recognised by leading public health organisations and prestigious peer reviewed journals as the the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.

A recently released report, commissioned by 20 of the most vulnerable countries, highlights the size of the threat: climate change is already responsible for 400,000 deaths annually, mostly from hunger and communicable disease. And our carbon-intensive energy system causes another 4.5 million deaths annually, largely due to air pollution.

Along with the old and disadvantaged, children are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change. Children suffer around 90% of the disease burden from climate change.

What can our children expect if we continue the way we’re going?

Even if current international carbon reduction commitments are honoured, the global temperature rise is predicted to be more than double the internationally agreed target of 2°C. Humanity continues to pour record amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. It has been argued that, if this continues, reasonable hope of avoiding dangerous climate change will have passed us by in a mere 16 years.

The impact climate change has on children born today may well be decided before they can vote on it.

Climate change will affect global agricultural productivity and food security, with 25 million additional children predicted to be malnourished by 2050. The estimate of an additional 200 million “environmental refugees” by 2050 has become the widely accepted figure. This means, if we do not intervene, millions of children will suffer the adverse mental, physical and social health impacts associated with forced migration.

The impact climate change has on children born today may well be decided before they can vote on it. Steve Slater Wildlife Encounters

The intensity and frequency of weather extremes will increase. This will result in increased child illness and death from heat waves, floods, storms, fires and droughts. The increased incidence and severity of floods, for instance, will increase child illness and death from diarrhoea and other water born diseases.

We’re likely to see more asthma, allergies, disease and other adverse health outcomes that disproportionately affect children. A recent report observed that climate change may make serious epidemics more likely in previously less-affected communities. This report also found that changing climate conditions have the potential to stimulate the emergence of new diseases and influence children’s vulnerability to disease.

Australians will not be immune to these changes.

It has been estimated that climate change will mean that Australian children will face a 30% to 100% increase across selected health risks by 2050. Indeed, if we fail to act, future generations of Australians may face a three- to 15-fold increase in these health risks by 2100.

Because their brains are still developing, children are particularly vulnerable to toxic levels of stress. Increased exposure to trauma and stress because of climate change is likely to affect children’s brain development and mental health. Children surveyed six months after the 2003 bushfires in Canberra, for example, showed much higher rates of emotional problems. Nearly half had elevated symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Research has also found that prolonged exposure to adverse weather conditions is associated with increased child and adolescent psychological distress over time. As global warming drives local and regional change to home environments, children, like many non-human animals will experience place-based distress (known as solastalgia) at the unwelcome changes.

An additional 25 million children around the world are predicted to be malnourished by 2050. United Nations Photo

We are only beginning to understand the impacts that climate change will have on children’s physical and mental health. More research at the regional and local levels is desperately needed so we can adequately understand, prepare for and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Children cannot avoid hearing that the window of opportunity to act in time to avoid dramatic climate impacts is closing, and that their future and that of other species is at stake. While the psychological health of our children needs to be protected, denial of the truth exposes them to even greater risk.

We must listen to the fears and concerns of children and young people and include their voices in discussions about climate change.

The existence of cost effective ways to reduce climate change means there is no excuse for inaction. Climate change and the carbon-intensive energy system are currently costing 1.7% of global GDP and are expected to reach 3.5% by 2030. This is much higher than the cost of shifting to a low carbon economy.

Right now the science is telling us that we are not doing enough.

As children are innocent and non-consenting victims of climate change, adults have an ethical obligation to do everything possible to prevent further damage to their ability to thrive in the future. To do otherwise is to ignore the very thing many of us see as the most important reason for living.

Brad Farrant is supported by funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council. He has no commercial interests of any kind.

Fiona Armstrong is Convenor of the Climate and Health Alliance.

Glenn Albrecht has previously received funding from an ARC DP project and an NCCARF grant.

In an email to CAHA he agreed to make public, Professor Tony McMichael provides another critique of the McKeon review’s narrow approach to health and medical research.

This McKeon Review ‘consultation paper’ contains, for the wider social enterprise of public health research, a dismal but predictable set of recommendations. The name ’NHMRC’ incorporates the words ‘Health and Medical’, but the McKeon Review panel membership comprised ‘medical’ rather than ‘health’ persons — eminent researchers in laboratory and clinical science — along with a strong representation of the private for-profit business (including biotech) sector.

Of course, it’s easy to rail against this McKeon Review output and the restricted, orthodox, and somewhat closed-shop NHMRC mentality. However, the document also provides a sobering reminder of the fundamental problem that societies face today in their need to expand their concern, research effort, resources and policy to abating the big, and unprecedented, systemic threats to population health and survival from human-caused climate change and other extraordinary global environmental changes. These threats to health are of a kind not previously faced, and a broad and distinctive genre of research in relation to them is required.

The committee members are very able people who, variously, have great intellectual, reputational and financial investments in the status quo; they are at the top of their professional pyramids; and they probably cannot imagine a different world in the near future with a radically different spectrum of health-risk issues.

History has seen it all before. As prolonged droughts closed in on the Maya civilisation in the ninth century, contributing greatly to the weakening of the agricultural base (already stretched by a population that had expanded substantially), the rulers and opinion-leaders opted for ever larger edifices and grander ceremonies. They had, presumably, little understanding or interest in the increasingly precarious longer-term prospects of their society. Hay was to be made while the sun shined. It was business as usual, but always with a growing appetite for ever-more resources.

Dubai today is following suit, in a region of the world where they have had to give up trying to grow their own grains, now that their once-only aquifer supplies have been depleted. Meanwhile, the sheikhs and financiers opt for world-tallest buildings and creating (and selling) artificial island ‘nations’ in the Gulf that have been built to a mere couple of metres above the (rising) sea level.

The McKeon Review perspective is of a kind with these assumptions of business-as-usual (in a stable world). It is not surprising that the Chief Executive of Medicines Australia, Brendan Shaw, has been quoted as saying this week: “We are encouraged by the McKeon Review’s recognition of the importance of clinical research both as generator of economic benefit, but more importantly as a generator of health benefits for Australian patients, and the recognition of the important role the medicines industry plays in this.

This event was attended by 52 enthusiastic participants from a range of health facilities, state departments and universities. We certainly achieved our aim of starting an important conversation about how hospitals and healthcare providers can reduce their own carbon footprints (mitigation), and in doing so how the Australian health system can be strengthened through the promotion of greater sustainability and environmental health. While hospitals have a big ”environmental footprint”, many are finding that sustainability measures benefit patients and the environment and offer financial savings. We also discussed the role of the health sector in building capacity to deal with the impact of climate change on health services (adaptation). A Policy Issues Brief on this topic was drafted for the AHHA’s Institute, and circulated to registrants ahead of the PTT.

The keynote speaker was Professor Peter Orris from the USA, Senior Advisor from CAHA’s international partner organisation, Health Care Without Harm.

Professor Orris is the Director of the Occupational Health Service Institute and Global Chemicals Policy Program at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, a component of a WHO Collaborating Center. Dr Orris has served as advisor to WHO, PAHO, Federal, State and Local Governments, environmental organizations, labor unions and corporations.

A series of Canberra-based meetings were organized with Peter in the two-days ahead of the PTT including with the Minister for Health and Ageing (Tanya Plibersek), the Minister for Climate Change’s Chief of Staff (Allan Behm), Senators Richard Di Natale and Nick Xenophon and officers from the Departments of Health and Ageing and Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. Professor Orris also presented a seminar for the staff at the Department of Climate Change with about 50 attendees.

Other speakers included:

Dr Kate Charlesworth, Public Health Registrar previously from the NHS Sustainable Development Unit